When you own a store, you will always have to deal with some customers who just can’t be pleased.

What would you do if you provided a service and then the customer was upset about it, so she decided to pay her bill using all pennies?

That is what happened to the shop owner in this story, so he gladly accepted the pennies. It was at that point, that the customer realized she hadn’t thought this through!

Let’s see what happens.

Malicious Compliance to Malicious Compliance

I run a repair shop where I employ a bunch of local kids (ages 16+) to learn skills and make some money while we generally sit around and talk about the world while we fix things.

We had a client come in with a busted electronic, we fixed it up for her and gave her a decent discount on the work.

Her final bill for parts and four hours of labor was a hundred dollars even, discounted down from two-hundred and twenty.

The customer was not happy.

She didn’t like the bill.

She didn’t like the work.

She claimed that we’d broken something else.

She claimed that the kid who did the work didn’t know what she was doing (she did, and I had supervised her) and that the kid who helped her in the front room was rude to her (he wasn’t, but she didn’t like the little pride flag pin he was wearing).

Some people are never happy.

She demanded to see the manager, so I popped out, listened to her tear into my kids, validated how she was feeling, but pointed out that the work she had asked for was done, done correctly, and her bill was due on pick-up of the piece.

The last straw for her came when she pulled out a credit card and I had to inform her that we don’t accept that particular card.

She literally asked me “Do you know who I am?” (which I didn’t, still don’t, don’t care), and I told her we’d take a personal check.

She wrote out a check, problem solved.

Actually, the problem wasn’t solved.

I deposited the day’s checks, and got a note from my bank that one had bounced.

Her check, of course.

I called her the next day to inform her that her check had been returned for insufficient funds, and that she’d need to come in and pay her bill, plus the extra fee for a returned check.

All of these fees, just to point this out, were clearly outlined on the service agreement she’d signed – and we’d already discounted her a hundred and twenty dollars, just to be nice.

The customer did indeed by her bill.

Anyway.

She rolls up into the office carrying a bag, and I knew exactly what was going on.

She drops – of course – a bag of pennies on the front desk.

She’s breathing heavily – we’re on the second floor and she’d taken the stairs – and she announces triumphantly that she’s here to pay her bill.

She just needs to go get the rest of our “hard-earned money” (said with a sneer, of course).

The kid at the front desk looks like he’s about to cry, so I stop working on the thing I’m working on and take over.

“How many more bags do you have?” I ask her, and she says that the nice people at the bank loaded them up in her car.

That is a lot of pennies.

She didn’t count them. I told her that was fine, we’d wait for her to bring them all up and then settle up her bill.

She was expecting a bigger reaction, I think – either that or she hadn’t thought this through.

Ten thousand pennies, plus the extra twenty-five dollars, weighs a lot.

And she’d just committed to carrying them through a parking lot and up a flight of stairs.

One of my kids, bless his heart, offered to help her carry them.

She refused.

Seems like she got revenge on herself!

Finally, shaking and sweaty, she deposited the last of the bags on the countertop.

The pennies were loose, not in coin-rolls. She’d done some work to prove her point.

What she hadn’t counted on was that we’d need to count the pennies.

While the other kids took care of other clients and fixed things in the back, the front-desk guy and I counted up the pennies.

She didn’t want to wait.

She started to realize that this was going to take a while, and tried to leave.

I told her that she couldn’t leave until we’d signed off on her bill, since at this point she was in violation of her service agreement and had passed a bad check, we couldn’t just take her word for it, and I would inform our local constabulary if she left without paying.

I was kinda bluffing, but she’d managed to tick me off a little.

The other clients in the shop came and went, and we counted.

Phone calls came in and were handled by my kids, and we counted.

She sat down in a chair (folding steel, not super-comfortable), stood up again, walked around the office, and we counted.

She finally couldn’t deal with waiting any longer.

After a while, she said “Just forget it,” and took out a hundred and twenty-five dollars in bills.

We signed off on her agreement and she started to leave.

Another one of my kids, bless his heart, asked her if she wanted help carrying the pennies back to her car.

She looked at all of us with a face of sheer panic, mumbled “no, thank you, just keep them,” and bolted.

The whole shop was silent for a moment.

Then one of the kids started giggling, and nobody could stop.

There was an elevator!

People coming in thought we’d gone nuts, and I finally had to banish everybody to the back room until they could breathe again.

We loaded the bags into my vehicle – we used the elevator she’d walked by a few times – took them to the bank and used the coin machine to deposit them, then wrote out a donation to our local shelter for the amount she’d dropped off.

She posted something nasty on Facebook about it and got ratio’d; she had, of course, posted earlier about what she was going to do and she got called out with her own post.

It sounds like her “Friends” know her quite well.

My favorite response was something like “You said you were going to pay your bill in pennies, you paid your bill in pennies – what went wrong?”

Please don’t pay your bills in pennies, folks.

Especially if you’re just doing it to be a jerk.

The paying in pennies thing seems like a good idea, right up until you have to actually do it.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about this story.

Too funny.

That would make things a lot easier.

She would have been so upset.

This would have been very funny.

This person wishes he worked there.

She got what she wanted, why is she upset?

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.